AMD announces fastest graphics card in the world
AMD today announced the availability of its flagship graphics processor, the ATI Radeon 5970.
According to the company the HD5970, which now holds the title as the fastest graphics card in the world, provides support for DirectX 11 and AMD’s Eyefinity multidisplay technology.
The unit comprises of dual AMD HD5870 GPUs and includes 3200 stream processors and a core clock speed of 725 MHz. It also features 2GB of GDDR5 1000MHz memory, 160 texture units and 64 ROP units.
Although most of the features found in the HD5870 have been simply doubled in the HD5970, its memory bandwidth is lower due to a reduced memory clock. Despite this the HD5970 still delivers a considerable 256GB/s.
Nonetheless the HD5970 delivers almost 5 TeraFLOPS of compute power, significantly more than Nvidia’s competing GTX 295 which delivers 1.78 TeraFLOPS. AMD has also addressed the overheating issues found in its last dual GPU unit, the 4870 X2.
The HD5970’s thermal system now consists of a vapor chamber and a fully vented exhaust system. The core of the unit is also based on the more heat efficient 40 nanometer (nm) manufacturing process.
AMD has also gone some way to ensure that the power requirements for the HD5970 are not excessive. The unit idles at roughly 42W and performs at 295W at full load – roughly 70% of that required by two HD5870’s in Crossfire.
Local availability
Jaco Laubscher, head of AMD South Africa has confirmed that the HD5970 will indeed be available locally adding that the first units should arrive within the next week.
Laubscher did however stress that the initial launch would see smaller quantities being shipped to South Africa with an expected first run of 10 to 15 GPUs. Asus will be launching the product with BTGames next week; as a result Laubscher expects that BTGames will be the first retailer to stock the HD5970.
AMD’s recommended retail price for the GPU internationally is $599 (R4492). A local pricing point is yet to be confirmed; this should be released next week says Laubscher.
Local users should not expect the HD5970 to come cheap. Currently the HD5870 retails for R3999, a rough guess for the new HD5970 is around R8000 – R9000.
AMD HD5970 graphics card – comments and views
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